November 18 Update: Late Eisenhower Holocausts; Big Oil's Methane Coverup; Drought in the Northeast; Buckle Up, It'll Get Rough; Clean Energy's Resilience; Apartheid's Gift to D.C.; Military Deportations?

It's time to put the Axe to everyone's favorite white collar criminal finishing school (photo courtesy of Joe Eskenazi)

Long time, no see. All that's old is new again in the emerging American Reich, as yet another feckless, hamstrung, Beltway & DNC insider-run trainwreck that was the Harris campaign founded in the face of rampant disinformation, voter discontent at worsening economic conditions and the Ukraine/Gaza wars ushered a criminal and would-be dictator back into office. With both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court firmly on his side, this go-round with Jamaica Estates' Klan scion be much rougher. Buckle up.

All that said (and there's far more to be said about it in the weeks and months ahead), I've been at work. Last week, I broke the news of yet another Terrorgram Collective arrest in the Pacific Northwest by American law enforcement. Though Oregon Neo-Nazi and Army veteran Kyle Benton was collared for possession of an illegal, unserialized machine gun. And yes, it's behind the paywall.

A prominent member of the child abuse/extortion network 764 received a 30-year-prison term on November 7th. Deep in my WIRED write-up of Richard 'Rabid' Densmore's sentencing hearing earlier this month is a critical fact: the FBI and USDOJ consider 764 to be a 'category one' domestic terrorism threat. Densmore's hearing was also notable for the of Matt Olsen, the head of DOJ's National Security Division, at a press conference later that afternoon. It's a sign of how dangerous 764, com, and its offshoots have become and how seriously law enforcement are taking the phenomenon.

I also did the full hour on KPFA's Law & Disorder program shortly after the election to run the rule over municipal races in Oakland and San Francisco, where floods of cash and disinformation from tech/finance/real estate-affiliated gray money networks have buoyed the prospects of reactionary candidates. As I pointed out to host Cat Brooks, this election was a mixed bag for the San Francisco network, which did not do well on either ballot propositions or its slate of candidates for the SF Board of Supervisors, and definitely not in Oakland, where Mayor Sheng Thao was recalled but reactionary candidates lost out in the council races. Money can't buy you love.

That's enough. Back to regularly scheduled programming from here through the year's end. I'll have something up midweek behind the paywall on the NYPD's intelligence division, and there's a...different...type of article in the works. Culture reporting - believe it or not, I've got a bit of that.

Let's get to it - AND HAPPY STANFORD HATE WEEK TO ALL THOSE WHO PARTAKE.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-They knew, they knew, they knew. We've heard that line before about fossil fuel producers and climate change, dating back at least to the 1970s. You can move that date forward another twenty years to the 1950s, according to documents unearthed by the Guardian about what oil majors knew, when, about the catastrophic impacts of oil, coal, and gas.

-On that note, the Financial Times investigated - and exposed - how energy firmed masked the emissions of methane (shorter lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but far more harmful while it is circulating) from oil and gas wells. Fixing methane leaks and flaring is one of the easiest and most effective fixes we can take as a species towards curbing global warming, and these companies would rather flaunt the law than take a minor step for the benefit of the planet.

-The Northeast is in a drought, and New York City has been inundated with smoke from wildfires in Northern New Jersey and the adjoining New York State counties just west of the Hudson. While Westerners know all about the risks of fire season, this is...brand fucking new to the Mid-Atlantic. Grist took a solid look at how New York State's critical agricultural sector (there are a LOT of farms north of the Westchester line, people) are coping with the current lack of rain - the driest October and November on record in New York City.

-The next four years will be bad. Key institutions are going to be right in the firing line. It's important to not blink and not give in. Gideon Rachman at the FT lays out the stakes in a sobering but clear-eyed column today.

-One policy that won't get put back in a box will be the massive shift towards clean energy. All puffery and grandstanding aside, there's no going back on what a kilowatt of solar or wind costs now compared to coal or natural gas. Thanks to the excellent reporters at Grist for their sober assessment of where the clean energy sector is now, and where it's going in the near future.

-The biggest wild card in the upcoming American Reich will be the role played by Apartheid's worst spawn (I know, that's a high bar to clear) in not only choosing personnel but guiding policy. He's got a unique gift for lighting money on fire - let's see if his forays into failing media companies (Twitter is shedding users fast and bleeding money like a stuck pig) and Tesla's declining share of the EV field are any reflection on his aptitude in the public sector. Take a look at Gil Duran's Nerd Reich piece for a look at Elon's Big Trip to Washington.

-Sadly, it is going to get worse before it gets better. And it looks like the military will be deployed within the United States to round up undocumented folks as part of the GOP's campaign vows to outdo even Obama on deportations. We'll learn more about this proposal in the very near future, but it'll be costly, cruel, chaotic and most likely, ineffective.

BOOK - The small parallel states and fiefdoms erected by the ultra-wealthy throughout the Western world have spawned a cottage industry of academic and journalistic accounts. Some are great (Quinn Slobodian) some are lazy and self indulgent (a forthcoming title I'm sure you'll see me slated elsewheres). Tom Burgis' 2020 Kleptopia is one of the earlier and superior volumes on this topic.

From his enviable perch as a correspondent for the FT (and now the Guardian) in Londonistan, Europe's biggest laundromat for ill-gotten cash, Burgis tracks ill-gotten flows from the former USSR, Swiss banks, CIA-adjacent criminals in Brooklyn and elsewhere through the gears of the financial system. It's a book very much in the vein of Misha Glenny's magisterial - and prescient - McMafia from 2008.

FILM - You may know French director Jaques Audiard for his 2009 prison epic Un Prophète, the finest genre movie out of the Hexagon since La Haine and the start of Tahir Rahim's rise to stardom. Less well-known is Audiard's 2001 heist-romance starring Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos.

The former is an ex-con who enlists Devos, his partially deaf boss, into a robbery. Devos, whose character is abused and mistreated by her office colleagues, thrives off Cassel's lascar attitude. The eponymous lip-reading by Cassel and nonvocal exchanges between both actors make this film. It's a great distraction, and outright hilarious in parts.

MUSIC - Leonard Cohen lived an...enviable life. We should all get to call the Aegean island of Hydra home at some point in this existence, or the next. Even as he aged, the poet and inimitable songwriter's voice aged into a melodic, gravelly rattle. Like David Bowie, his final album is up there with Cohen's best. There's something comforting in his fatalism and certitude. The tracks are also true earworms.